Saint Joseph Catholic Church

Following a private Mass at the apostolic nunciature and a farewell ceremony (video), Pope Leo XIV departed this morning from Luanda, Angola’s capital and largest city, for Equatorial Guinea.

In Christ, “the profound harmony between truth, reason and freedom is manifested,” Pope Leo XIV said this afternoon at the inauguration of a new university campus in Equatorial Guinea.

The Becket Fund, which is representing Catholic parents in the case, explained:

In 2022, Colorado’s Department of Early Childhood created a universal preschool program to provide all kids with 15 hours per week of free education at a private or public school of their parents’ choice in the year before kindergarten ...

When implementing this program, however, the Department chose to deny this benefit to parents who send their kids to Catholic schools. Rather than work with all licensed preschools in Colorado, the Department imposed restrictions that categorically barred the Archdiocese of Denver’s Catholic preschools from participating—excluding over 1,500 kids attending over 30 different preschools simply because their parents chose a Catholic education.

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed a brief in the case.

The Assembly of Catholic Ordinaries of the Holy Land expressed “profound indignation and unreserved condemnation of the desecration of a representation of Jesus crucified by an Israeli soldier in a Lebanese village.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that he condemned “the act in the strongest terms. Military authorities are conducting a criminal probe of the matter and will take appropriately harsh disciplinary action against the offender.”

Pope Leo convoked the meeting “to proceed, in mutual listening, to a synodal discernment on the steps to be taken in order to proclaim the Gospel to families today, in light of Amoris Laetitia and taking into account what is currently being done in the local Churches.”

The General Secretariat also announced a June 23-25 preparatory meeting to prepare for the continental evaluation assemblies of the implementation phase of the synod on synodality.

The bishops and other ordinaries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, and Azerbaijan elected Cardinal Giorgio Marengo (Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia) as the conference’s president; Bishop José Luis Mumbiela Sierra (Almaty, Kazakhstan) as vice president; and Auxiliary Bishop Yevgeniy Zinkovskiy (Karaganda, Kazakhstan) as secretary general.

Pope Leo XIV addressed Equatorial Guinea’s political and civil leaders today (video) and encouraged them to serve the City of God, rather than the “lust for power and worldly glory that leads to destruction.”

“The escalation of the current conflict in the Middle East will have consequences beyond borders and further worsen hunger worldwide, especially among the most vulnerable populations,” the diplomat warned at the 38th session of the Regional Conference for the Middle East.

In its report, Vatican News, the news agency of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication, inaccurately described the Vatican diplomat as an archbishop. The Annuario Pontificio notes that Father Arellano was named a monsignor in 2016, but has not been named a bishop.